The9 Limited has launched a new soccer-themed game on Facebook called Winning Goal. While there has been absolutely no shortage of soccer games released on the social networking platform over the past few months, The9 Limited hopes they can offer something to fans that they can’t find elsewhere.

First off, the game has been endorsed by a soccer legend (at least a soccer legend to those who regularly follow the sport) – Diego Maradona, the current coach of the Argentina national team. The object is to take over your own five player soccer team using real players from past and present generations of the sport, from all over the world.

The game starts you off with a basic team of five players and shows you the ropes of gameplay. You’ll challenge other people in a game, and will then watch the automated match play out in front of you. This takes around 30 seconds for a full 90 minute match. You have no control during this sequence, as of course, you are the coach, not the players.

After the match ends (whether you win or lose), you can click on the “Prize Draw” button to see if you won a new skill or even a new player for your team. In terms of players, they are ranked by color, with green players being the lowest rank, or quality player, all of the way up to orange, which is the highest rank (blue and purple are in between). You would of course ultimately aim to fill your team with Legend Rank players, in order to have the best quality team available.

In addition to winning players from Prize Draws, you can also Scout new players, but hitting the “Search” button in the Scout Search area, which is located at the bottom right of the game’s home screen, as seen below. In addition, if you have any friends playing the game, you can steal the players that they’ve scouted.

When you go to challenge other players (keep in mind you have a limited amount of matches available to play per day), you can choose to challenge either people from around the World, those Friends that you may have that play the game, or the Top 100 players in the game.

To create more of a “completionist” aspect to the game, you can earn Achievements (collect a certain amount of players of varying ranks), complete Daily Goals (defeat a certain number of opponents, steal a required number of players, and so on), and even complete special World Cup themed events, like challenging the 1930 World Cup Champion Team, as one example.

Of course, if you’d like to quickly upgrade your game, you can purchase items from the game’s store that will allow you to more easily sign new players, skip the actual soccer game animations, and reveal all information about a manager’s scout, as just some examples.

To see what else Winning Goal has to offer, head over to the game’s page on Facebook.